Two hundred years after the author's birth, Lily Cole - an admirer of Bronte's work - explores her world and the groundbreaking novel she produced, Wuthering Heights. Given that Bronte had to publish her book under the androgynous pseudonym Ellis Bell, Cole goes on to consider the parallels in terms of contemporary women's ongoing struggle to achieve equal pay, recognition and opportunity in their chosen profession. (David O'Shaughnessy)Coincidentally, Libreriamo (Italy) has selected a few of her poems translated into Italian.
Jane EyreAutostraddle has a rather puzzling remark:
The fictional heroine of Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel finds herself to be the governess at Thornfield Hall, where she quickly becomes romantically acquainted with her employer. Jane Eyre is an example of a governess who, despite constantly being described as plain and weak, is in fact one of the strongest characters in the novel. She is known by generations past and present as a headstrong woman who defies the characteristics of the traditional Victorian woman. (Eliz Akdeniz)
What was your first encounter with shorn women? Perhaps it was through literature. Who can forget Jo in Little Women, surely the queerest ostensibly straight girl in the English canon (aside from maybe Jane Eyre), lopping off her hair out of a sense of duty: “Your one beauty!” cries golden-curled Amy. (Jennifer Thorp)However, there is also a scene of a girl having her hair 'lopped off' in Jane Eyre.
Es un diálogo entre el ensayo y la ficción a través de veintisiete palabras de la A la Z, una por cada letra de este diccionario alternativo a la RAE. [...] De un relato lésbico insertado en pleno Jane Eyre al cuento de una hacker que se venga de su trol misógino. (Briseida Cidoncha) (Translation)In Your Area has 'The complete guide to winter walks across the UK', including
YorkshireAnneBrontë.org tells about 'The Kindness And Charity Of Charlotte Brontë'.
The-complete-guide-to-winter-walks-across-the-UK-13Top Withens, the farmhouse mentioned in Wuthering Heights Credit: getty
Where: Brontë Walk, Haworth and Top Withens Walk, West Yorkshire
Explore the dramatic scenery on offer as you an 8.3 mile walk through the valleys and hills lived and loved by the Bronte sisters.
Walk through dramatic moorlands, immerse yourself with the stories spun by the sisters and feel inspired.
Part of the hillside and landscape is Brontë Waterfall about a mile from Stanbury, below the falls is an old stone bridge called Brontë Bridge, rebuilt in 1990 after a flood destroyed the original. (Khadija Taboada)
Greetings from the Editor
Deborah A. Logan
Introduction: Emily Brontë’s Bicentenary
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Amber Pouliot
An introduction to the collection of articles on Emily Brontë's work in celebration of the Bicentenary of her birth.
“Gold put to use of paving stones”: Internal Colonialism in Wuthering Heights
Margaret Markwick
Wuthering Heights is a northern writer's rebuttal of the colonizing tendencies of the south-east's metropolitan elite. Casting Wuthering Heights as the center and Thrushcross Grange the periphery, Emily Brontë presents the North as solid and without artifice, while the South represents imported and suspect values. Lockwood personifies all that is malign in the colonizing nexus, a subject Brontë had explored in her Gondal poems. But she was also a realist: Wuthering Heights both elegizes a way of life that is passing and unites the best of both worlds. Themselves the products of North / South parents, Hareton and Cathy, in their impending union, herald a new and stronger future, where Yorkshire values are invigorated by the influx of southern capital.
Wuthering Heights Must Be Defended!: Heathcliff and Necropolitics in the Yorkshire Moors
Eamon DeLacy
This article draws on the "necropolitics" of Achille Mbembe to reconsider the figurec of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. It explores the resonances between Heathcliff's depiction in the novel and the broader 19th century vision of the colony and the colonized subject while arguing for a centering of the corporeal in the analysis of Brontë's prose. Utilizing the concepts of bare life and homo sacer developed by Giorgio Agamben, the piece argues that Heathcliff must be read as a somatic inscription of the biopolitical regimes of power of the British Empire.
Emily Brontë’s Ars Moriendi
Carol Margaret Davison
Wuthering Heights, a generically hybrid, metaphysical work combining ghost story, Gothic, regional novel, ars moriendi, and spiritual autobiography, is a morally complex, post-Enlightenment meditation on loss and a Victorian social critique. Focusing on ghosts, corpses, four semiotically-loaded deathbed scenes, and Nelly Dean's narrative, this essay examines how Brontë's Christian and artistic agendas work in tandem to advance a unique engagement with the Death Question. This includes crafting a spiritual biography for Heathcliff who is dramatically transformed as a result of his experiences with death and grief; ambivalently employing ghosts and corpses to both sensational and Protestant ends; and manipulating the traditional Methodist deathbed formula for the purposes of rendering more realistic character portraits, and portraying the world beyond the grave as a realm of divine mystery.
Wuthering Heights and the Work of Loving One Dead
Sarah Ross
In 1847, two texts dealt with the subject Søren Kierkegaard terms "The Work of Love in Remembering One Dead." This essay reads Emily Brontë's sole novel, Wuthering Heights, through and with Kierkegaard's somewhat radical Christian text about the labor of remaining constant to the dead beloved. Whereas post-Freudian notions of melancholia and grief regard prolonged mourning as pathological, Brontë's Heathcliff performs the fitting work Kierkegaard describes. Combining mental creativity with Christian ontology, Brontë animates the test of love's selflessness as it struggles to live in a perpetual present, amidst interested parties and the continual passage of time.
Absent Emily: Ecstasy, Transgression, and Negative Space in Three Emily Brontë Poems
Lydia Brown
This paper examines three Emily Brontë poems—"Stars," "No coward soul," and "I am happiest when most away"—to argue that, formally and theoretically, Brontë's purposeful dissolution of poetic identity arrives at ecstasy, a paradoxical source of feminine power and ubiquity. The interpretation situates "ubiquity in absence" among writings by Anne Carson, Dutch mystic Hadewijhch II, and Jack Halberstam's queer theory to assert that sacred space, for Brontë, is interior, multiplicitous, dynamically transformable, and feminine. Furthermore, God, for Brontë, is an interior capacity for self-creation or self-immolation rather than an external force of morality. These re-envisionings of Brontëan poetics allow for increasingly complex understandings of the fluid gender and power dynamics within Brontëan identity.
Emily Brontë and Will
John Maynard
The essay explores certain poems by Emily Brontë, treating them rather as a canon within her poetry, wherein she asserts the power of will over external circumstance and offers a tentative conception of individual will that precedes and succeeds the universe itself. This discussion asserts that these are exceptional poems deserving greater recognition than they have had thus far. Will is especially associated in these poems with the power of imagination. Language is seen, as in Nietzsche, as a power to shape and control reality.
“A poet, a solitary”: Emily Brontë—Queerness, Quietness, and Solitude
Claire O’Callaghan
Emily Brontë is often remembered for her extreme reserve and was clearly an atypical woman for her time. A figure who struggled within the conventional social fabric, rarely does empathy find a place in writings about her. This paper revisits some of the popular and dominant conceptions of Emily's reserve and seeks to find a more productive—even compassionate—way of understanding her preference for solitude. Emily's writings, especially her poems, provide such an opportunity to do so. While recognizing the negative and undoubtedly painful expressions of emotion in Emily's oeuvre, the analysis argues that more positive insights into Emily's desire for solitude can equally be found in her writing. Accordingly, drawing on queer theoretical sources, the paper posits a revised reading of this "difficult" Brontë that seeks to open alternative possibilities for understanding Emily's introverted nature.
The Last Bluebell: Anthropocenic Mourning in the Brontës’ Flower Imagery
Shawna Ross
Bluebells flourish in the Brontës' poetry and novels, including Charlotte's Shirley, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Emphasizing Emily's novel and poems, this article explores how bluebells function serially both as reminders of the cyclical rebirth of spring and as inspiration for mourning. Used to negotiate mortality and homesickness, bluebells represent a temporality of loss that chafes against the rhythms of seasonality. To explore this temporality, Anna Tsing's work on the matsutake mushroom and Alexis Shotwell's on ecological purity discourses are discussed to reveal how Emily Brontë's bluebells offer synecdoches of human and ecosystemic loss and rebirth. Further, Charlotte's editing of Emily's works reveal how she purifies them into a conventional pastoral, unwittingly recapitulating both the loss of her sisters and the loss of moorland biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, these synecdoches allow the texts to acknowledge loss, but the digressive temporal and spatial repetitions of mourning they engender simultaneously redirect readers' attention to rebirth, memory, and stewardship.
The Devastating Impact of Lord Wharton’s Bible Charity in Wuthering Heights
Lydia Craig
Since 1695, the Lord Wharton Bible Charity has bestowed distinctive Bibles and two religious books to Yorkshire children able to recite certain Psalms and the catechism. Evidence for the Brontë' siblings' familiarity with the charity's project includes their respective literary criticism of the misuse of rote Scriptural memorization and quoting and the presence of two Wharton Bibles owned by the Brontës in the Brontë Parsonage Museum Library. Descriptions of the charity's project appear in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), representing the catalyst for Catherine and Heathcliff's growing alienation and resistance to Christianity.
Restored by God, Restored as God: An Exploration of the Genesis Myth in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre
Clara Poteet
This essay argues that Emily and Charlotte Brontë remapped the Genesis creation myth onto Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, casting Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester and Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff as two very different Adam and Eves, who restore themselves to the Garden. Catherine and Heathcliff reject the Christian God and replace Him with a triune god of their own making, consisting of themselves and the moors. Alternatively, Jane and Rochester's initial love, idolization, separation, and restoration under God is explored in direct relationship to Genesis. Despite their shared Anglican upbringing, Emily and Charlotte's personal differences in relating to an internal or external God intrinsically affected how their Creations were restored.
Women and Landscape in Wuthering Heights
Amy R. Possidente
While many critics discuss Catherine as being representative of nature and her daughter Cathy in terms of culture, this paper shows that Brontë stages much of young Cathy's coming of age outdoors in nature. The scenes of Cathy's development reveal a constant tension between the domestic and safe parks of Thrushcross Grange and the wild, sexualized moorland. Ultimately, it is Cathy's ability to unite nature and culture or the domestic and wild in a way her mother could not that allows for the daughter's more traditional happy ending.
Preternatural to Paranormal: Wuthering Heights in the Twilight Universe
Judith Wilt
Stephenie Meyer's blockbuster paranormal quartet of Twilight novels both echoes and queries the legacy of Wuthering Heights, its lovers reading / debating the thrust of Brontë's novel while they too struggle with the gift / burden of soul, of change, of mortality. Concentrating on the female quest for a heroic self-actualization in these two stories, this essay looks at the trope of reading itself, and consider the authors' similar deployments of the romantic triangle, as the self / soul seeks housing, or resists it, in the concepts of tribe, clan, and family.
The Neo-Victorian Presence(s) of Emily Brontë
Sarah E. Maier
Since the arrival of "Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell" on the literary scene in 1847, the intense desire to unmask them—even after they were revealed as Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë—has led to much guesswork and fictionalizing about their lives and their works. This investigation will consider how the re-visioning of Emily Brontë's personal history in recent neo-Victorian biofictions of her character(s) allows for a reconsideration of the intensity of her literary life and of her personal life as an unconventional young woman.
For the Use of Such Ghosts as Choose to Inhabit It
Alexandra Lewis
A short story using characters from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
Book Reviews by Amber Pouliot
Review of Helen MacEwan, Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë’s Troubled Brussels Legacy (Eastbourne: Sussex University Press, 2018), 258 pages, ISBN 978-1-84519-910-4
Christine Alexander and Sara L. Pearson, Celebrating Charlotte Brontë: Transforming Life into Literature in Jane Eyre (The Brontë Society, 2016), 204 pages, ISBN 978-0-9505829-0-0
It begins with a flock of birds taking raucous flight; and even though there are no crows to be seen above the heather-flecked moors around the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, it’s difficult to discern whether this is reality, or a fantasy. I’m immersed in the latest heritage project dedicated to the literary family: a unique audio experience that combines Emily’s poetry, folk music and West Yorkshire’s grand landscape to produce something quite incredible.Apart from The Secret World of Emily Brontë, presented by Lily Cole and to be broadcast on Channel 4 on December 29th, Lily Cole's short film, Balls, will also be broadcast on Channel 4 that day as reported by The Telegraph and Argus.
The Emily Brontë Song Cycle, an audio production pairing Emily’s poems and music by folk group the Unthanks, was commissioned by the Brontë Society, which runs the sisters’ old family home the Parsonage as a hugely successful museum. The last couple of years has seen a number of Brontë bicentennial anniversaries; this year marked marked 200 years since the birth of Emily, best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights.
Emily is perhaps less known for her poems; indeed, only one – Remembrance – was published in her lifetime [???]. But it was her verse that composer and pianist Adrian McNally and the Unthank sisters Rachel and Becky turned to, eventually turning Emily’s poetry into songs that marry with the landscape that inspired and informed all three sisters in their own ways.
The final product is a hi-tech audio trail that leads people out out of honey-pot tourist trap of Haworth and up Penistone Hill, along dirt tracks that cleave the bleak and beautiful countryside, accompanied by commentary from McNally and the Unthank sisters. Along the way, radio frequency beacons are hidden to keep the music coming, and visitors are given noise-cancelling headphones to insulate them from the outside world, with only the haunting voices of the Unthanks and Emily’s often dark poetry in their ears. It’s an utterly immersive experience – so much so that, as I head up what’s known locally as the Balcony Path, a Lycra-clad cyclist silently barrelling down towards me startles me so badly that I jump. The effect of the music and landscape together creates an almost separate reality, in which even the most mundane modern intrusion feels like a jarring shock.
The music was recorded at the Parsonage, with McNally composing on Emily Brontë’s own piano, a five-octave cabinet piano from the early 19th century. Kitty Wright, executive director of the Brontë Society, called the process a “pleasure to witness”: “[McNally] brought music back into the rooms where the whole family had enjoyed the same piano so many years ago. The link between Emily’s words and the wild surroundings of the moors has an eternal fascination for visitors and we look forward to how the song cycle and listening experience brings a new interpretation to the well-trodden paths around the area the Brontës knew so well.”
The choice of songs is perfectly pitched for the walk, which at a leisurely pace takes around 40 minutes. The trail runs from 17 December to the end of March; a canny move as the route is quieter than in high summer, and all the more atmospheric for the absence of people, save the occasional dog-walker.
As you pass through the churchyard, the first song is Deep Down in the Silent Grave; at the crest of Penistone Hill walkers are invited to listen to High Waving Heather and cast their gaze to the west, and the hillside site of Top Withins, thought to be Emily’s inspiration for Wuthering Heights. And yes, up on those wiley, windy moors, the ghost of Kate Bush does occasionally tap at the window. Her song Wuthering Heights – 40 years old in this year of Emily’s bicentenary – has no doubt brought many a coach-load of visitors to Haworth. But the Unthanks’ songs could be seen as a companion to Bush; they get under your skin in the same way, with Emily’s poetry feeling, at times, like contemporary lyrics. They are, however, even darker than Wuthering Heights, focused on death and loss in a uncompromising manner. But, as McNally notes in the audio trail, although the poems are entrenched in darkness, they offer “a truth and integrity that will endure”.
Channel 4 will show Balls, the Wuthering Heights-inspired short film by social activist and model Lily Cole, on December 29.We sincerely wish that the people and news outlets which were so quick to criticise and judge the Brontë Society's decision would, if not apologise, then comment on it and admit that it was the right choice. Balls has been a success after all. As we said at the time, the Brontës wrote under pseudonyms knowing that critics would judge their works beforehand if they knew their real identities, so let's make it our goal for the year that will mark the 173the anniversary of the publication of their poems (when they first chose their noms de plume) to stop judging people for their gender or what you may think about them and let's focus on the results. We would also like to congratulate the Brontë Society and Lily Cole for being so brave in the face of such negativity.
Cole created the eight-minute movie in her role as the Brontë Society’s creative partner during the 200th anniversary year of Emily Brontë”s birth.
In focusing on Wuthering Heights anti-hero Heathcliff, a foundling, she also teamed up with the Foundling Museum in London.
She explored the mid-19th century links between London’s Foundling Hospital and Emily’s novel, in which heroine Catherine Earnshaw’s father adopts young Heathcliff after finding him on the streets of Liverpool.
Balls was premiered in Haworth during a special weekend to celebrate Emily’s 200th birthday, and received an awestruck reaction from literary enthusiasts.
At the time, the museum’s head of communications Rebecca Yorke said: “Balls is a very moving film, short and hard-hitting. While it was playing you could hear a pin drop.”
Cole’s film was screened for visitors to the museum until the beginning of December, along with a display of objects from the Foundling Museum Collection.
In late 2017 the Brontë Society announced Lily Cole as one of its high-profile creative partners for this year, to help celebrate the bicentennial of Emily Brontë’s birth. [...]
At the time, Cole said she had long been fascinated by Wuthering Heights and its “enigmatic” writer, adding: “The fact that Emily had to change her name – to Ellis Bell – in order to publish the novel intrigues and inspires me.”
Although Cole’s efforts for 2018 were to focus on weighty subjects like foundlings, gender politics and women’s rights, her inclusion divided Brontë Society members with one, Brontë biographer Nick Holland, announcing he would resign at the “disgraceful” decision.
Cole considered following Emily’s lead and making Balls under a pseudonym, but her film went on to receive critical acclaim.
David Wilson, director Bradford City of Film, this week said Balls was among several TV and film projects that during 2018 had received significant support from Bradford Film Office.
He said: “Once again Bradford has proved its film friendly credentials with a significant number of UK TV dramas and some very prominent feature films choosing to use locations in the city..
“We continue to win the confidence and the friendship of some of the major producers and directors along with the crews who make magic happen on our screens.
“With a good number of enquiries for next year already under way and international collaborations in development, we have much to celebrate in 2019, the 10th anniversary of Bradford as a UNESCO City of Film”. (David Knights)
The TV film is gorgeously made but is not a mere costume drama. It is anchored as much in the mud and rain of the landscape as it is in the slowly burning literary genius of its three Victorian heroines. Often with dramas about literary figures, there is a narrative flaw in depicting what the artist creates and how it is done. Not here. The claustrophobic atmosphere in the Bronte household, incandescent with the force of the stories and poems the women create, conveys everything. (John Doyle)Coincidentally, too, December 29th is also the day Patrick Brontë and María Branwell got married.
Cime tempestose (Emily Brontë): scritto nel 1857 [sic], si tratta di uno dei romanzi più esemplificativi della narrativa romantica d'oltremanica. Le sue atmosfere cupe e drammatiche, i personaggi vittima della loro insoddisfazione, la natura che urla prepotentemente la propria supremazia: Emily Brontë ha scritto un libro eccezionale, che è ancora oggi uno dei principali esempi di scrittura femminile "nera". (Translation)Esquire (Spain) tells a behind-the-scenes anecdote of Wuthering Heights 1939.
Cumbres borrascosasYourTango recommends The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters if
Como solía ocurrir en Hollywood, esta historia de amor gótico entró en la órbita de Samuel Goldwyn envuelta en una nube de incertidumbres. Supuestamente, el productor Walter Wanger pensó en hacer una versión cinematográfica protagonizada por Sylvia Sidney y Charles Boyer. Laurence Olivier quería que la protagonista femenina fuera su prometida, Vivien Leigh, y consideró que la elección de Merle Oberon era un disparate. David Niven no tenía ningún interés en participar. Pero ‘Cumbres borrascosas’ arrancó ríos de lágrimas entre los espectadores americanos, las mismas que derramaron el director y sus artistas para llevar a la pantalla la romántica historia de Emily Brontë. (Iván Iglesias) (Translation)
you're a fan of Gothic literature or you can't get enough of Jane Eyre, you'll swoon for this scary tale of a wealthy family whose fortunes aren't what they once were. To make matters worse, the county estate where they live seems to be the center of a curse sure to lead them all to ruin! Spooky! (Rebecca Jane Stokes)
Jane Eyre. Das MusicalFurther information on Tips and OÖNachrichten (both in German).
Original Cast Gmunden
Musical Director by Caspar Richter
HitSquad Records
Jane Eyre: Elisabeth Sikora
Mr. Edward Rochester: Yngve Gasoy-Romdal
Mrs. Fairfax: Carin Filipčić
Blanche Ingram: Leah Delos Santos
St. John Rivers: Marcel Philip Kraml
Mrs.Reed/Grace Pool: Heidelinde Schuster
Mrs. Scatcherd/Bertha: Carmen Wiederstein
Mr.Brocklehurst/ Vikar: Dennis Kozeluh
Richard Mason: Max Niemeyer
Robert: Roman Straka
Starting today, December 17, at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee
Monday 17 December 2018 - Sunday 31 March 2019
The Emily Brontë Song Cycle by the Unthanks
The Brontë Parsonage Museum is thrilled to present this new audio experience featuring the poems of Emily Brontë set to music by composer and pianist Adrian McNally and recorded by The Unthanks.
Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee is a song cycle of ten poems offering audiences the opportunity to follow in Emily's footsteps up on to nearby Penistone Hill where the dramatic landscape which so inspired Emily and her sisters can be experienced and enjoyed.
PLEASE NOTE: The Museum is closed during January, although the audio experience will still be available to collect from the Museum shop, and the suggested route takes place entirely outside. Please note, therefore, that it will not be possible to view Emily's piano in the historic rooms between 2 January-3 February inclusive.
Commissioned by the Brontë Society to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Emily Brontë, Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee is free with entrance to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Places on this special experience are limited so participants are advised to reserve headsets in advance of their visit by using the booking links on this page.
The start time is the recommended time participants arrive at the Parsonage in order to look around the house where Emily wrote much of her poetry and see her piano. Adrian McNally composed the song cycle on and for this precious instrument, and the songs were recorded by The Unthanks in the historic rooms late at night earlier this year. After the Museum visit, participants can collect their audio sets and head off through the churchyard and up on the moors for a circular walk accompanied by the poetry of Emily Brontë and the music of The Unthanks.
Participants will be required to leave a £10 cash deposit when collecting the audio sets. This will be returned when the audio sets are brought back to the Museum at the end of the walk.
The walk lasts approximately 40 minutes and although the terrain is uneven in places, the paths are well trodden. Warm clothing and sturdy footwear is recommended. Participants agree to undertake the walk at their own risk.
There is something unequivocally classic about reading in winter. As the evenings become long and cold and the days grow dark, that is when our inner shut-in can really appear. The changing sunlight has a phenomenal impact on not just our mood, but reading styles as well, among other things. Nothing makes me happier than curling up in the cold months with a book featuring overcast skies and windswept landscapes, to accompany its plotline of sadness and anguish. Wuthering Heights is one favourite that comes to mind; Russian literature is another. (Wajiha Hyder)The Pioneer (India) reviews an English translation of آنگن (The Women's Courtyard) by خدیجہ مستور (Khadija Mastur).
[Daisy] Rockwell [the translator], focuses on the feminist leanings of the narrative, remarkable for the milieu and time from which it has come, and likens Mastur, like others before her, to one of the Brontë sisters.The Boar and the ultimate literary Christmas dinner guest list:
She hastens to add, that though the Brontës too lived circumscribed and extremely short lives, they were certainly free to wander outside in the Yorkshire moors. (Gautam Mukherjee)
Nearest the door, you will see a young Cathy Earnshaw, gargling mulled wine that she has pinched from a despondent Eva and attempting to launch roast potatoes into Gatsby’s lap. She will try to ride your Golden Retriever like a horse and then proceed to throw up on your new shearling rug after stuffing her face with yule log.The Writing Cooperative on gifts no writer really needs:
Watch out for your white furnishings, as adult Cathy is not exactly the first guest who comes to mind when you are planning a calm evening: you will turn your back and she will have started a fight with Hermione after ripping up her personalised cracker and throwing it into the air so that it rained down like snow. Fortunately for you, as she has nearly eaten you out of house and home, she will later go on hunger strike when she finds out that she cannot bring Heathcliff as a plus one.
You may have almost lost your sanity as you attempted to fix a hyper Cathy to her chair and listened to Hermione drone on about why it is so important to study the historical role of magic in today’s Christmas traditions, but you have made it out of your literary dinner party alive. (Charlotte Anne)
As I was telling a writer friend about this piece, she laughed and rattled off a stream of other items I could include. But when she spouted out, “Charlotte Brontë t-shirt”, I paused. She’d reeled off three more items before I stopped her by bellowing, “Whoah! Whoah! Whoah! Uh…I might need that Brontë shirt.” She laughed and responded, “You know, you might want that Brontë shirt, but you certainly don’t need it.” And that’s the crux of it right there. (Hilarie Pitman Pozesky)D.E. Monnier on the same web says:
Some novels have left an indelible impression on me: Wuthering Heights comes to mind. The Brontë sisters’ work so affected me that I made a pilgrimage to Yorkshire. I retraced their steps, walked the steep, cobblestoned streets of Haworth, and felt the wild beauty of windswept moors.Jane Eyre 2011 will be available to stream on Amazon Prime on January 1 (The Wrap) and will leave Hulu on January 31 (AltPress).
No hay otra mujer en Colombia que representara como tú, en tu época, esa mujer que se atrevió a romper los esquemas literarios pertenecientes a los hombres, como lo hicieran en un poco antes de ti en otras latitudes Coleridge, Woolf, Austen, Brontë, a las que leíste y sin duda, te dejaron la inquietud, la espina. Acá, sin embargo, hemos olvidado un poco tu nombre. (John Franco) (Translation)Krytyka Politiczna (in Polish) publishes an excerpt of the novel Nieuprzejmość by Katarzyna Kochmańska:
Nie mogę patrzeć, jak kobieta cierpi. Więc ona zrywała ze mną relacje, kiedy jej o tym mówiłam, a ja ciągle je łatałam. Nieustannie wracało do mnie bolesne przekonanie, że to ja się źle zachowałam. Że to była wielka przyjaźń, a ja ją zawiodłam. Że przecież to jest jej wybór, jeżeli chce być w związku, który przynosi jej cierpienie, ma do tego prawo (tego się nauczyłam z książek sióstr Brontë). (Translation)
This is a new production inspired by the Brontë sisters story being performed in Los Angeles:The Inkwell Theater presents the world premiere ofBroadway World has some additional information:
Sisters Three
by Jami Brandli
Directed by Annie McVey
Featuring: Robyn Cohen, Dana DeRuyck & Kara Hume
Set Design – Lex Gernon
Lighting Design – Joey Guthman
Costume Design – Allison Dillard
Sound Design – John Zalewski
Prop Design – Rebecca Carr
Dramaturge – Diana Wyenn
Stage Manager – Karen Osborne
Fight Director – Collin Bressie
Produced by Daniel Shoenman & Rosie Glen-Lambert
December 14th – January 20th
Fridays and Saturdays @ 8pm Sundays @ 2pm
Thursday 12/20 & 12/27 @ 8pm
Monday 1/7 & 1/14 @ 8pm
VS. Theatre
5453 W. Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90019
An off-center dramedy about family, social media, fame, and the holidays, Sisters Three pays homage to the Brontë sisters, and their brother Patrick. After a family tragedy, Charlotte has dropped out of society and joined a no-technology commune on Gondol Island. EJ and Anne are building a canoe to rescue her. As individual secrets and desires are becoming more apparent, it is threatening to tear the sisters apart.
"I am committed to giving voice to female protagonists, so I always start with female leads...or rather, the female leads start with me," says writer Jami Brandli. "This play was inspired by the Brontë sisters, all novelists and poets. Though it's not a biography, the fascinating sibling dynamic includes their brother Patrick, who was a painter, in a modern retelling of a complicated family of artists and big thinkers now living in a society that seems to place more value on the veneer of a perfect Instagram post rather than appreciating the beautiful complexities of reality."
Emily Brontë will forever be remembered for her powerful gothic novel. But while Wuthering Heights continues to seduce readers, she actually started out writing poetry and it’s her poems that are at the heart of a new project involving The Unthanks.Culture Vulture interviews Adrian McNally from The Unthanks:
The acclaimed folk band have taken a selection of her poems and turned them into songs. They will perform their new Emily Brontë Song Cycle for the first time in a concert at Leeds Town Hall a week today.
Yorkshire-born Unthanks pianist and composer Adrian McNally was commissioned by the Brontë Society to create a record, performed with bandmates Rachel and Becky Unthank, to mark the 200th anniversary of Emily’s birth.
Kitty Wright, Executive Director of The Brontë Society, feels it has been a hugely successful collaboration. “As well as writing that one stonking novel, Emily was a poet, she drew and painted, like her sisters, and she liked music and played the piano We wanted to look at her as more than just a writer and that came together with this project and the Unthanks were an obvious choice.”
McNally and his bandmates have worked on historical projects in the past, but he admits they hadn’t appreciated just how popular Emily is. “We weren’t aficionados in any great way and I think it was probably a good job we weren’t. Had we realised quite how revered she is, we probably would have been petrified.”
As it turned out, this distance enabled them to look at her afresh. He created the songs using Emily’s piano which is still housed in the Parsonage in Haworth, where she and her sisters lived and worked.
McNally found playing her rare, five-octave cabinet piano inspiring but also challenging, at least initially. “It requires the pianist to play lighter than they have ever played a piano. It took me a while to realise this but as soon as I did I developed a real affinity with the instrument.”
He wrote the songs in the piano room, penning the music for the whole song cycle in his first evening. “There’s so much of her poetry that is really rhythmic that the poems almost read like songs and they were ideal for putting to music.”
As well as the concert, the song cycle is available as a record and the band have also produced a free audio experience, that can be pre-booked at the Parsonage, so that visitors can go on a guided walk. “It means you can listen to Emily’s poetry set to music in those hills where she used to roam.”
Both McNally and the Unthank sisters now count themselves among Emily’s fans. “You feel like you’re reading words of integrity and truth from someone who perhaps never thought her words would be read, and I really admire her.”
The Emily Brontë Song Cycle, December 21, Leeds Town Hall. For ticket details call the box office on 0113 376 0318 or visit www.leedstownhall.co.uk
Commissioned by the Brontë Society to mark what would have been Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday, Adrian has transposed a number of her poems into music. The resulting Emily Brontë Song Cycle is performed by The Unthanks next week at Leeds Town Hall.Freedom to Teach Collins gives ideas for teaching Jane Eyre:
Adrian got to use the Brontë sister’s own actual instrument, a five-octave cabinet piano dating from the early 1800s. Composing after-hours at the Parsonage Museum in Haworth, he was chaperoned at all times by a member of staff.
“Everything at the museum is so precious that I was made to write under constant supervision,” he says. “It was deemed to be for my own safety, that if anything was damaged or went missing it couldn’t be me. Imagine songwriting under those conditions.” (...)
During the day Adrian worked up the songs using the German upright piano at nearby Ponden Hall. Now a working B&B, it is generally acknowledged as the inspiration for Thrushcross Grange, home of the Linton family in Wuthering Heights.
Working at Ponden Hall gave the degree of freedom he needed, particularly as he was being called upon to write songs, rather than simply arrange them as is more usual. Making the daily journey to and fro – as Emily might have done nearly two centuries ago – allowed a distinct resonance to emerge.
“I even got to sleep in the room with replica box-bed that Emily and her sisters used to sleep in at Ponden. They used to visit there a lot because it had a better library than their own apparently.
“If you pull back one of the panels, it reveals this tiny little window which Emily is supposed to have based Cathy’s ghost coming through the window to Heathcliff on.
“I’m not saying I got loads of sleep the first night,” he adds with a chuckle.
Jane Eyre is a transcendent novel, I’ve read it as an 11 year old and through my teens then in to adulthood and it gets richer and more relevant with each sitting. It’s an incredible choice for the classroom as 170 years later it still has lines that floor me with their relevance to today’s society: ‘It is not violence that best overcomes hate – nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury’. Ask your students how this quote can be applied to today’s political climate or can they contextualise it against a situation they have come across recently? The novel is thematically rich and packed with literary devices so I’ve put together five discussion points you might like to use with your class; these would work well as speaking and listening assessments too, as well as five extension points that can be set as homework or revision tasks. (Read more) (Joanna Fliski)Can a sleepless night awaken creativity? in The Guardian:
Famous insomniacs include William Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust so could there be a positive side to sleeplessness.And the source of all that apocryphal information is...?
This is the ambition that Emily Brontë voices in her poem “Stars”, when she begs the twinkling deities to hide her from the sun’s hostile light: “Let me sleep through his blinding reign, / And only wake with you!” Brontë is famed for having experienced visions at night. Greedily, she invoked sleeplessness as the source of her imagination. But even she eventually tired of night-waking. Ritually, she would walk around her bedroom each night, desperate to fall asleep. (Marina Benjamin)
What is rhyming? “Nailing a hunch to an instinct,” writes Carol Ann Duffy, soon to quaff her last butt of sack as poet laureate. It’s a very good line indeed, and there are plenty more like it here.Los Angeles Times presents the play Sisters Three, now at the Inkwell Theater in Los Angeles:
Despite the title, Sincerity offers endless ironic masks, often from history. We meet Charlotte Brontë, Shakespeare, Queen Victoria, Richard III and a “luckless loutess of a troubadour/ offstage, as it were, mending her lute” while the Magna Carta is signed nearby. (Tristram Fane Saunders)
The essentials: After a suicide, four siblings are three. They’ve always been deeply connected, having grown up somewhat isolated and interacting within a self-created alternate world. In tragedy’s aftermath, the oldest of the three, a famous food blogger, withdraws to a no-technology commune. The other two resolve to draw her back, with the youngest creating an elaborate social media strategy to document it. The story, set in a U.S. university town, is inspired by the sibling dynamic among the Brontë sisters and their brother.The Weekly Standard and last lines of novels:
Why this? This is the third new play L.A. will see this year by local playwright Jami Brandli, following “Through the Eye of a Needle” and “Bliss (or Emily Post Is Dead!).” The latter, a riff on four heroines from ancient Greek tragedies, was a Times Critics Choice. The new “Sisters Three” is by no means biographical, but the Brontës’ symbiotic ties intrigued Brandli, who set off in new directions to tell a story about “the lengths to which family will go to bat for each other.” The world of publishing looms large, but it’s on the internet, giving rise to another theme: “the struggle to find genuine meaning in our current society that places a lot of value on a curated social media life versus a person’s real life,” she says. And, because Brandli loves Christmas, it’s set on Christmas Eve. Above all, it continues her mission to, as she puts it, “bring female narratives to the stage.” The sisters here are “extremely complicated, and they all have their own journey,” she says. “They are not a supporting character in somebody else’s story” — a quality, she believes, that helps explain her career’s momentum this year. Inkwell Theater, the presenter here, develops and produces new plays. It workshopped “Sisters Three” two years ago. (Daryl H. Miller)
The last lines of Wuthering Heights and Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister both feature moths, the nocturnal lepidoptera instinctively associated with the gathering darkness. Emily Brontë’s is a restful farewell: “I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” Whereas Nabokov bursts in on his dystopian denouement with a scene of himself and an ill-fated moth on his window screen. “A good night for mothing,” Nabokov, an expert collector, concludes. (Alice B. Lloyd)India Today reviews the novel Unhappy Families by Khadija Mastur:
Known as the Brontë Sisters of Urdu, Khadija Mastur and her sister, Hajra Masrur, were involved in the powerful literary grouping known as the Progressive Writers' Movement first in Bombay and later when they moved to Pakistan. (Rakhshanda Jalil)Slate lists the best audiobooks of 2018:
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. Emilia Fox and Richard Armitage take turns reading tales that accentuate the erotic, unruly, and atmospheric possibilities of Carter’s source material, and they make the most of it. Fox’s delivery is dulcet to the brink of breathiness (but no further), and Armitage broods and pines as magnificently as Heathcliff himself—except when he cuts loose as a bawdy, flamboyant Puss in Boots. (Laura Miller)The Times describes a restored Tudor house in Hastings:
Hendy ushers me through the rooms, as immaculately composed as still-life paintings. In a fireplace, a line of tiny Victorian farm children’s sabot clogs from a French brocante suggest an absent family. Birds’ nests, dried toadstools and taxidermised crows and magpies lend an intriguing maleficence. The result is Grimms’ fairytale meets Romanian folklore meets Wuthering Heights-on-Sea. (Gemma Bowes)Also in The Times, an obituary of the actress Patricia Simmonds (née Gilder) who played Emily Brontë in the 1951 BBC production, The Brontë Family.
«Es esta en verdad una hermosa región. No creo que me hubiera podido fijar en toda Inglaterra en un paraje tan del todo apartado del mundanal ruido; es un perfecto paraíso para misántropos...». Sr. Lockwood. Cumbres borrascosas. Emily Brontë amaba la soledad, la soledad de los páramos de Haworth, una localidad perdida en el West Riding de Yorkshire que apareció en el mapa gracias a la fama de la escritora y de sus hermanas. Charlotte, la mayor, aún vivía cuando llegaron al pueblo los primeros turistas, lectores que ansiaban ver el lugar donde las autoras se habían criado y visitar el Parsonage, la rectoría o casa parroquial en la que residía el reverendo Patrick Brontë con su familia. En la mesa del comedor aún hay manchas de tinta. A Emily se le atascaba siempre la plumilla. A veces estudiaba en la cocina una gramática de alemán, mientras amasaba el pan, papel y lápiz en mano, por si se le ocurrían unos versos entretanto. Poesía recién horneada, olía a tarta de manzana. Pero las delicias que le inspiraban estaban tras la ventana, en los páramos martirizados por inviernos largos. Aquí el verano sólo vendrá para hacer una visita corta de formalidad, lo llenará todo de brezo color bermejo y se irá.The Vision (in Italian) and pseudonyms:
Pero hiciese el tiempo que hiciese, Emily salía al campo a pasear, por un sendero cicatero que empieza justo detrás de la casa-museo. Estaba mal visto que las mujeres fueran solas a caminar, pero vecinos y ovejas se tuvieron que acostumbrar a verla pasar, como una sombra (extra)vagante que el sol perfilaba alta, flaca, encorvada, alargándose sobre los pastos. Llevaba las mismas botas pesadas que hubiera calzado Ellis Bell, el pseudónimo masculino con el que compartía iniciales para firmar sus escritos, porque tampoco se aconsejaba que una señorita se perturbara ejerciendo una carrera literaria. Llevaba un taburete pequeño (ahora hay bancos para sentarse en el camino) y un secreter portátil de palisandro tamaño caja de zapatos expuesto en el museo. (Read more) (Mertixell-Anfitrite Álvarez) (Translation)
Lo stratagemma del fingersi uomini funzionò particolarmente bene in campo letterario, dove l’attribuzione di un’opera poteva molto più facilmente essere elusa che nelle arti figurative. Il caso più famoso è quello delle sorelle Brönte (sic) – Charlotte, Emily e Anne – che assunsero rispettivamente gli pseudonimi di Currer, Ellis e Acton Bell. Come scriverà Charlotte nel 1850 nella premessa a Cime tempestose, composto dalla sorella Emily: “Non volevamo dichiararci donne perché, – senza che a quel tempo sospettassimo che il nostro modo di scrivere e pensare non è quel che si chiama ‘femminile’ – avevamo la vaga impressione che le autrici fossero più inclini ad essere viste con pregiudizio”. Dopo il grande successo di Jane Eyre, Charlotte e Anne si presentarono di persona dall’editore Smith, Elder & Co. (che si era convinto che tutti i romanzi fossero stati scritti dall’inesistente Ellis Bell) per rivelare la loro identità. L’editore restò sorpreso, ma preferì continuare a pubblicare i libri con nomi maschili per non scioccare il pubblico. Fu Charlotte, l’ultima superstite, a riabilitare il cognome Brönte (sic) per tutte le sorelle. (Jennifer Guerra) (Translation)Le Point Afrique (in French) reports the Maryse Condé's acceptance speech of the New Academy Literature Prize. Decking the halls in Oakwell Hall in The Telegraph & Argus. Diario de Almería (Spain) compares a local politician with Jane Eyre. A local Finnish TV station (Yle Areena) broadcasts Jane Eyre 2011 (Pohjalainen reports). Il Refugio di John Silver (in Italian) reviews Jane Eyre.
More Christmas gifts around:Brontë Sisters Book Collection
$ 175.00
This Brontë Sisters Set is a collaboration between Obvious State and Juniper Books.
What a remarkable family. The Brontë sisters--Anne, Emily and Charlotte--were three gifted writers who developed their narratives together. For this Juniper Books collaboration, we drew inspiration from the Greek story, "The Three Muses" and the Hawthorn tree, which is native to the moors where the Brontë's lived (and where stories like Wuthering Heights are set).
1847 saw the publication of 3 novels from an author named Brontë: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey. It was the year that would cement the status of the sisters as literature’s most famous family. These masterpieces (plus 4 more) are now available in hardback volumes we’ve wrapped with original Obvious State custom illustrations. Set includes:
Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
The Professor by Charlotte Brontë
Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Dimensions
8.25 tall x 8 in wide x 5.25 deep
Charlotte Brontë ToteAnd many more.
$ 24.00
"I would always rather be happy than dignified." - Charlotte Brontë
A cyclist makes her own path. From her novel Jane Eyre.
• 13” x 15” with 24” handles
• Handmade and printed in Brooklyn, NY
• Premium, heavy 100% natural cotton canvas
• Hand-pulled print, colors my vary slightly
• Extra long black handles, 1” gusset
Original artwork by Obvious State, not endorsed by or affiliated with the attributed author. All applicable rights reserved.
Emily Brontë - He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.(Via Huffington Post)
I print my original Emily Brontë quote print on a high quality professional printer. I've chosen this printer as it prints VIVID deep COLORS that makes my art look stunning! - The prints have a vibrancy about them, that you will not find anywhere else!
I've designed this print to make the perfect Wuthering Heights Quote / Emily Brontë Quote for you or as a gift for a friend - If you order this Emily Brontë quote print I promise you will experience LOVE at first sight!
Who is your favorite novelist of all time? Charlotte Brontë. My feeling of kinship with “Jane Eyre” has never waned.Bustle recommends '12 Female-Driven Period Dramas To Stream When You Need To Bounce Out Of 2018', including
9. Jane EyreLeeds List offers ideas for 'cosy Yorkshire escapes'.
Another dive into literary feminists, this adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel stars Mia Wasikowska as the titular governess. Michael Fassbender plays her mysterious Rochester, with direction from Cary Fukunaga. (Casey Cipriani)
Ponden HallOn the other side of the pond, according to Seattle Magazine, Jane Eyre. The Musical is a must.
Ponden Hall is a sensational find. It’s an old stone farmhouse that’s been converted into an award-winning bed and breakfast. Gaze out of the mullion windows, huddle up on the period furniture and marvel at the original paintings. The bedrooms come with box beds, rocking horses and raftered ceilings – two even have log stoves. And it’s oozing with history too – it’s said to have been the inspiration for Thruscross Grange in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
You’re in the heart of Brontë Country here, just three miles from the town of Haworth where you can visit the Brontë Parsonage Musuem and the Keighley and Worth Valley Steam Railway. Or you can brave the weather to enjoy the stunning natural landscape on the edge of Haworth Moor overlooking Ponden Reservoir and near to the Pennine Way, which is perfect for winter walks. For a bite to eat, head to The Grouse Inn in nearby Oldfield for modern British cuisine, or The Old Silent Inn, a historic pub that has a menu full of local produce. (Joseph Sheerin)
Must WatchA contributor to The Herald-News tells about a childhood dream:
‘Jane Eyre, The Musical’
(Through 12/23) This musical re-imagining of Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel puts a new spin on the Victorian-era tale. Directed by Arts West’s Matthew Wright, the playhouse’s 10-person chamber version scales down the action of the original musical production but delivers the same full-throated story of its title heroine, set to Paul Gordon’s Tony-nominated music. Times and prices vary. ArtsWest Playhouse, West Seattle, 4711 California Ave. SW; 206.938.0963; artswest.org (Beau Iverson)
When I was a child, I wanted to meet my favorite authors and ask them questions. Of course, I knew meeting Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Brontë, and even Laura Lee Hope (before I learned she wasn't a real person) was impossible. (Denise M. Baran-Unland)Birdie Bookworm posts about Jane Eyre.
Wreath Making Workshop
Saturday 15 December - Sunday 16 December 2018
Make a festive wreath for your front door
December 15th 2018 02:00pm - 05:00pm
December 16th 2018 02:00pm - 05:00pm
Make a festive wreath for your front door inspired by the traditional Christmas decorations at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. All materials will be provided, and the workshop includes mince pies and mulled wine to get you in the festive mood! Please allow your own time to look around the Museum before your workshop.
The book, published recently by Pen and Sword Books, is said to reveal Aunt Branwell's true character, far removed from the stern disciplinarian of legend.Daily JSTOR discusses Jane Austen's 'Subtly Subversive Linguistics' and, apart from quoting from Charlotte Brontë's opinion of her, also states that
Nick Holland shows how Elizabeth influenced the lives and works of the Brontes, before and after her death.
He traces the surviving descendants of the Branwells, the closest living relatives to the Brontes today.
Elizabeth Branwell was born in Penzance in 1770, a member of a large and influential Cornish family of merchants and property owners. [...]
A spokesman for Pen and Sword said: “In this first-ever biography of Elizabeth Branwell, we see at last the huge impact she had on Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, as well as on her nephew Branwell Brontë who spiralled out of control away from her calming influence.
“It was a legacy in Aunt Branwell's will that led directly to the Brontë books we love today, but her influence on their lives and characters was equally important.
“As opposed to the stern aunt portrayed by Mrs. Gaskell in her biography of Charlotte Brontë, we find a kind-hearted woman who sacrificed everything for the children she came to love.
“This revealing book also looks at the Branwell family, and how their misfortunes mirrored that of the Brontës, and we find out what happened to the Brontë cousin who emigrated to America, and in doing so uncover the closest living relatives to the Brontë sisters today.” (David Knights)
Straight-laced film adaptations play up the marriage plots, troubled by how to interpret her finely crafted stories for a modern audience that expects instant gratification. They inevitably end up “Brontifying” Austen, dispensing with sense in favor of all out sensibility, in which unrelenting passion kicks quiet introspection or cool mockery out of the well-cultivated shrubbery and onto the misty moors. Darcy jumps in a pond because he just can’t deal. Elizabeth Bennet lives close to nature with her pet pig gamboling in the parlor. And Fanny Price weirdly just isn’t who she says she is. This is not to say they’re not enjoyable, but they may slightly miss the point, and the irony, of Jane Austen. (Chi Luu)WJCT shares its staff's favourite holiday reads.
Wuthering Heights by Emily BrontëUNC Greensboro recommends '2018 releases by faculty and alumni [which] make great gifts' such as
I read it for the first time back in high school. It was assigned by one of my favorite teachers. I devoured it over Christmas break underneath my family's Christmas tree and I try to reread it every few Christmases, by the lit up tree. I just love the old timeyness of it. The detailed descriptions of the damp, cold heights and the strange love story make being anywhere indoors feel cozy. - (Caitie Switalski, Broward County Reporter)
The Wild Inside (Harper Collins/William Morrow)The Washington Post features Rachel Pendergrass, who
By Jamey Bradbury ’09 MFA
Bestselling novelist John Irving calls “The Wild Inside” “an unusual love story and a creepy horror novel — think of the Brontë sisters and Stephen King.” Bradbury is a graduate of UNCG’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. (Avery Campbell and Susan Kirby-Smith)
hosts Nerd Nite DC at DC9 on the second Saturday of every month. At each gathering, three volunteers give educational and entertaining PowerPoint presentations on topics like the Brontë sisters’ lesser-known works and computer programs’ failed attempts to write jokes.Who What Wear on maxi dresses:
While summer saw earthy hues and rustic fabrics, such as linen and cotton, proliferate, this winter has been all about long-sleeved, high-necked midi and maxi dresses that come in a plethora of prints and colours: Think Little House on the Prairie meets the moor-roaming Brontë heroine, with a 21st-century twist. (Joy Montgomery)The Mancunion reviews Kate Bush's The Whole Story.
Opening this compilation is the genius ‘Wuthering Heights’, which Bush remixed and re-recorded herself for this project. This remixing was done purely with the intent on giving the song a more mature sound, replacing Bush’s original vocals for the track when it was released in 1978, when Bush was just 19. This minor alteration in sound really does highlight the subtle change in vocal depth and resonance Bush developed in the eight years between the original track release to the polished and perfected iteration heard on The Whole Story. (Bella Fleming)Chapters 36-38 of the Jane Eyre manuscript are analysed on The Eyre Guide.
The Film Society of the Lincoln Center in New York is making a complete retrospective of the film director Jacques Tourneur. Including, of course, I Walked with a Zombie 1943:I Walked with a Zombie
Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1943, 35mm, 68m
In Tourneur’s second collaboration with producer Val Lewton, a Canadian nurse working on an island in the West Indies turns to voodoo with the hope of curing her patient. Loosely based on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, I Walked with a Zombie features a quite peculiar kind of romance, and is perhaps Tourneur’s most poetic film: a haunting, audacious studio picture that presents a complex meditation on colonialism and our relationship with the past, as seen here through the living’s uncanny connection to the dead. Print preserved by The Library of Congress.
Preceded by:
The King Without a CrownJacques Tourneur, USA, 1937, 35mm, 10m
This MGM “Historical Mystery” considers the possibility that Marie Antoinette’s son Louis XVII fled to the United States during the French Revolution and was raised to be a missionary among Native Americans. Print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Friday, December 14, 9:00pm*
*Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street
Saturday, December 22, 7:45pm
Wednesday, January 2, 9:00pm
Of “Jane Eyre,” she writes, “The wind that blows through this novel is the wind of sexual equality.” (Craig Morgan Teicher)A contributor to Medium discusses costume dramas.
Colorblind casting has been gaining traction in the theater for several decades, and more recently on television and film — recent productions like the 2017 television version of Howards End and William Oldroyd’s 2016 film, Lady Macbeth (an adaptation of a 19th-century Russian novella), included actors of color in minor or supporting roles. Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011) saw Heathcliff played by black actors Solomon Glave and James Howson. And Amma Asante’s Belle (2013) was the exceptionally rare period drama both made by and starring women of color. (Joanna Scutts)Vogue Australia features 'model, actress, activist, swimwear and lingerie designer' Emily Ratajkowski.
I ask about her parents – John David Ratajkowski, a contemporary artist, and Kathleen Balgley, an English professor, who “would hand me books as I was growing up and say: ‘Emily, you’re at the age for this one.’” In third grade it was To Kill a Mockingbird – “the classics” – and later, Wuthering Heights. (Zara Wong)Still in Australia, Booktopia asks 'Ten Terrifying Questions' to writer Nikki McWatters.
4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer? [...]La Vanguardia (Spain) interviews writer Kate Morton.
In literature it was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights that struck a chord. I related so deeply to the complicated character of Catherine, and Heathcliff was my first literary crush.
Su literatura recuerda a los románticos británicos. Pero, más en concreto, ¿cuáles son sus referentes literarios? Son tantos… Pero siempre vuelvo a los autores que me hicieron convertirme en escritora. Libros y autores muy ingleses, sobre todo. Por ejemplo, las hermanas Brontë. (Fernando García) (Translation)Chris The Story Reading Ape Blog has writer Anne Goodwin tell some tidbits about herself.
Tramper of moorsMSN has selected '10 of the most famous movie nannies' including
Walking is my main form of exercise, as well as my go-to strategy for reaching that state of reverie where the ideas flow. I take a short walk most days (unless it’s peak slug-slaying season in the garden) and, every other Sunday, I’m out on the moors as a volunteer ranger for the Peak District National Park. In late spring/early summer, I lead a walk in Jane Eyre country with readings from Charlotte Brontë’s well-loved novel. Maybe you’ll join me one day?
Jane Eyre (‘Jane Eyre,’ 2011)Culturamas (Spain) lists Wuthering Heights as one of 25 classics to read in your lifetime.
Based on the iconic Charlotte Brontë novel of the same name, the Gothic romance recollects the experiences of Jane, a mild-mannered governess who finds out her employer has been hiding a sinister secret.
Cumbres borrascosas de Emily Brontë.Jewish World Review is all for 'urban Luddism'.
Cumbres borrascosas, la épica historia de Catherine y Heathcliff, situada en los sombríos y desolados páramos de Yorkshire, constituye una asombrosa visión metafísica del destino, la obsesión, la pasión y la venganza. Con ella, Emily Brontë rompió por completo con los cánones del decoro que la Inglaterra victoriana exigía a toda novela, tanto en el tema escogido como en la descripción de los personajes. La singularidad de su estructura narrativa y la fuerza de su lenguaje la convirtieron de inmediato en una de las obras más perdurables e influyentes de la historia de la literatura.
And that brings us to the cellphone. The late Steve Jobs may be a secular saint to some, but to old-time urbanites, not so much. As in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, the first few arrivals didn't seem a big deal. My initial thought, seeing a few early, clunky models on the street, was, What kind of poor slob isn't allowed to think his own thoughts while walking home without being ambushed by orders or questions from the office? Next, part of the romance of urban life evaporated. No more could you imagine that the girl with the face of an angel might have the mind of a Jane Austen or the heart of a Jane Eyre. "I tried on jeans at Bloomingdales for, like, half an hour, and I'm at 65th Street now. I'll be at the bar in, like, five minutes. Wait, maybe six. The light just turned green. I'm crossing Lexington Avenue now." My champion was the ice princess who wirelessly broke up with her boyfriend while walking up Madison Avenue. She kept having to repeat herself, because he obviously couldn't believe she was doing it — and doing it over the phone, moreover. So she gave him reasons, each more ego-crushing than the last. Less Jane Eyre, I'm afraid, than Lady Macbeth. (Myron Magnet)Broadway World UK looks back on 2018 theatre-wise.
New and younger companies made a lasting impression, with The Fall presented by the National Youth Theatre, and Wasted, an original musical about the Brontë siblings - both at Southwark Playhouse. The first was a candid look at growing old in a climate that's becoming more and more adverse; the latter set 19th-century Yorkshire to rock music to introduce its world-renowned writers. (Cindy Marcolina)WWD is reminded of Wuthering Heights by Chloé's Pre-Fall 2019 collection.
The collection’s boho vibe was on fine form, as always without too much of a romantic tilt, with the designer folding feminine soft elements like printed silk blouses and scarves into hard-edged looks. Key ingredients included Carnaby Street-inspired velvet; trompe l’oeil-printed houndstooth fabrics that gave a horsey, “Wuthering Heights” flavor, and utilitarian wear. (Katya Foreman)Maddalena De Leo writes about Emily Brontë's drawing of Trajan's Arch in Ancona on the Brontë Parsonage Blog. AnneBrontë.org has a post on 'The Moving Stories Of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell'.
Late Night Thursday: Open Until 8PM
Christmas at Brontë Parsonage Museum
December 13th 2018 05:00pm - 08:00pm
Join us for a glass of sherry, some Christmas cheer and the chance to see the Parsonage dressed for the Christmas season. The Museum shop will be open to buy those last minute gifts, or you may just be tempted to treat yourself!
After 5pm, entry is free to visitors providing proof of residence in BD22, BD21, BD20 or Thornton. Usual admission prices apply to all other visitors. Pre-booking not required.
Wuthering Heights, Emily BrontëMaryse Condé mentioned Wuthering Heights in the acceptance speech of her 'alternative' Nobel Prize in Stockholm. As reported by Actualitté (France):
Though Wuthering Heights is the only book by Emily Brontë, both the novel and its enduring fame speak for themselves. This classic work of gothic fiction, featuring scenes set during Christmas, is perfect to read by candlelight and teaches its reader about passion, morality and humanity. (Rachel E. Greenspan)
« Je suis fière, extrêmement fière, d'être celle qui a fait entendre la voix cachée de la Guadeloupe », s'est réjouie Maryse Condé devant le public réuni à Stockholm. Elle est revenue sur sa rencontre avec la littérature : « Quand j’avais 10 ou 12 ans, une amie de ma mère m’a offert un livre pour mon anniversaire. L’auteur du livre s’appelait Emily Brontë, le livre Les Hauts de Hurlevent. En Guadeloupe, où je vivais, personne n'en avait entendu parler. Mais dès que j'ai lu quelques pages, c'était pour moi qu'il avait été écrit. » (Antoine Oury) (Translation)El diario de Cantabria (Spain) praises Wuthering Heights as well.
Que esta novela sea creativa no la atribuye solo que sea buena. Su belleza, su poesía, consiste en la unión atípica de lo que es acostumbrado y habitual con lo que nos impresiona porque es brutal y salvaje. Emily carecía de un talante comunicativo y expresivo con los demás, sin embargo le era obligado abrirse y comunicar todo su rico mundo interior mediante la escritura. Nadie, ni sus más allegados, sus hermanas, podían franquear libremente sus proyectos y su corazón. (Jose Antonio Ricondo) (Translation)Borough Market announces that on Friday, December 14th, food writer and cook Kate Young will be cooking 'a menu inspired by her favourite festive reading'.
Kate's menu will include:The Ecologist discusses IPCC's 'special report on the impacts of global warming' quoting extensively from Jane Eyre.
• Buckwheats from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Mincemeat, with conversation about Jane Eyre, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Bridget Jones's Diary and everything in between
• Pepparkakor, Swedish Christmas biscuits from Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
• Chocolatl from Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
• Chipolatas with mustard and honey, and cranberry sauce from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J K Rowling
The Victorian novel plots a different, more complicated set of tabulations. It was in October of 1847, just three years before the start of the IPCC’s “industrial time", when readers would have first overheard Rochester - the leading man of Charlotte Brontë’s most famous novel - tell Jane Eyre of the monstrous femininity he encountered in Spanishtown, Jamaica circa 1793.Toute la culture (France) interviews singer Najoua Belyzel.
Reminiscing of a Miss Mason, Rochester tells Jane of “a wind fresh from Europe", which — in the oppressive night, buzzing with mosquitoes and redolent, he says, of hurricanes — “blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure". He goes on: “The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty.”
The liberty Rochester breathes in via the Atlantic tradewinds is not unlike the freedom Jane herself feels, when “the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing [her] with its bitter vigour.” [...]
But if Jane finds release in what she calls “mutiny,” freedom for Rochester blows in on the same sticky Caribbean air that pushed black bodies from West Africa to the island at a rate of no fewer than 8,000 per year in the 1790s.
There, in Jamaica, freshly kidnapped conscripts of modernity would harvest sugar cane until they died, impressed into an obscene industrial scheme defined by cane-pressing, whips, malnourishment, and human attrition.
These scenes of subjection do not figure in the marriage plot readers continue to care about most. But the Enlightenment-era atmospherics of Jane Eyre suggest how a romanticised vocabulary for freedom, woven through the language of self-affirmation spoken by these white characters, comes at the cost of, for example, the shambling animal locked on the third floor of Thornfield Hall.
This is Rochester’s first wife, who - as fans of the novel well know - will soon be sacrificed for the sake of the marriage plot. The fire that incinerates this colonial subject banishes the memory of the colony and leaves only a ruin while clearing the way for romance in the present: what remains are “shattered walls” and a “devastated interior”, Jane says; evidence of “calamity".
It is Bertha Mason, then, who comes to function as the residue of what the novel, almost accidentally, describes as the calamitous project of bourgeois freedom. As scholarship in my field has long known, she is the trace, ghost, or unbanishable reminder of the broken and immiserated humanity that the white marriage plot cannot assimilate.
In this way, Bertha should be understood as a kind of burned effigy to the world-ending that has always shadowed such dreams of freedom and progress as have been voiced by history’s Prince Alberts or Edward Rochesters. But as the IPCC report now confirms, the agony that has walked alongside bourgeois freedom from the beginning is now felt not just by precarious human beings but the earth itself. (Nathan K Hensley)
Toute la Culture : « Najoua, vous avez commencé à écrire des textes très jeunes, n’est-ce pas ? »Najoua Belyzel : « J’ai commencé à écrire des textes poétiques vers 13 ans. J’étais assez douée pour le français. J’adorais lire. J’empruntais souvent des livres à la médiathèque. Je m’inspirais beaucoup des romans à l’eau de rose, de la littérature victorienne, des sœurs Brontë, Les hauts de Hurle-Vent… (Magali Sautreuil) (Translation)
Ticknor Show and Tell(via Fine Books & Collections)
Tuesday, December 11, 6:00PM
First Church, Marlborough Street
As we do every December, Ticknor Society members will gather to share their favorite collectibles. (...)
Shannon Struble will present an overview of her collection of books and other materials related to Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre.
The greatest love stories in literature are curiously devoid of the kiss. From Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights -- never was even a chaste kiss on the lips expressed between protagonists Lizzy and Mr Darcy or Catherine and Heathcliff. (Lisa Portolan)Writer Maryse Condé has contributed a column to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
Men det var inte självklart att jag skulle skriva. När jag var tio eller tolv år gammal fick jag en bok i födelsedagspresent av en vän till min mor, som precis som hon var lågstadielärare. Hon visste att jag redan hade en massa böcker av författare som Flaubert, Balzac, Maupassant, Apollinaire och Rimbaud och ville ge mig något originellt. Boken var ”Svindlande höjder” av Emily Brontë. Jag började läsa i sängen samma kväll. Efter några sidor var jag fast. Jag skrattade och grät. Precis som huvudpersonen Cathy ropar ”Jag är Heathcliff!” så var jag på vippen att ropa ut ”Emily Brontë, det är jag!”AnneBrontë.org has an article on the publication of Agnes Grey in December 1847.
Någon kanske tycker det låter konstigt att en ung flicka från Guadelope kunde identifiera sig så intensivt med en engelsk prästdotter som levde sitt liv på Yorkshires hedar. Men sådan är nu litteraturens magi. Den erkänner inga gränser och har plats för alla de ouppnåeliga drömmar, besattheter och begär som förenar olika läsare oberoende av tid och rum.
När jag flera år senare besökte Japan drabbades jag av samma känsla. Det är stor skillnad på mig och en japan, både kroppsligen och vad gäller vad vi läst i skolan och i livsstil. Men I samma ögonblick som en översättare började läsa en av mina texter på japanska fylldes rummet av en stark känsla av gemenskap.
Dagen efter natten då jag började läsa Brontë sprang jag över till mammas vän för att tacka henne och berätta vilken inverkan hennes gåva haft på mig. Naivt nog slutade jag med att säga: ”Du ska få se att jag en dag också blir författare, och de böcker jag tänker skriva ska bli lika vackra och mäktiga som Emily Brontës.” Hon gav mig en förvånad, lite sorgsen blick och sade: ”Vad snackar du om? Såna som vi skriver inte böcker.”
Vad menade hon då med ”såna som vi”? Kvinnor? Svarta? Invånarna på små bortglömda öar? Det får jag nog aldrig veta. Men samtalet gjorde mig helt förstörd.
Som en följd av det kunde jag aldrig påbörja en ny roman utan att känna att jag var på väg in i en återvändsgränd. När jag sedan började skriva min egen version av ”Svindlande höjder”, som fick titeln ”La Migration des Coeurs” på franska och ”Windward Heights” på engelska, tyckte jag att jag hädade. Tack vare detta pris känner jag nu att jag besegrat en trefaldig utmaning. (Translation)
